UK firms wait for Sun's utility grid

Sun goes live with pay per use Grid option, but initially only in US

Sun Microsystems’ vision of a huge web-connected computing resource pool with utility pricing has finally gone live in the US – but UK customers will have to wait for some time yet to access the service.

To use the Sun Grid Compute Utility service in the US, firms can visit the web address below and pay by credit card to rent CPU cycles.

Organisations can upload and run applications, and pay for them at a rate of $1 per CPU per hour. The previously suggested additional tariff of $1 per gigabyte of storage appears to have been dropped, judging by the latest FAQ.

The service is primarily aimed at firms with compute-intensive routines that need to be run on an occasional basis, as an alternative to acquiring servers and running them in-house. However, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz conceded in his blog that his firm will have to rely on a “long tail” of smaller companies as customers.

“Frankly, it’s been tough to convince the largest enterprises that a public grid represents an attractive future,” Schwartz wrote.

Schwartz also said that the Sun Grid will initially only be available to customers inside the US in order to comply with US controls on technology export. Even for the US, provisioning will at first take up to 24 hours in order for certain security routines to be run.

The service will begin with a total of under 5,000 CPU sockets – a mix of UltraSparc and Opteron processors – but that will later be increased. Web services APIs will also be available to allow hybrid “mash-up” applications to be developed for the grid.

Most watchers praised Sun’s pioneering ambition. “This is very much a version 1.0 initiative and companies have traditionally done lots of due diligence before using other people’s hardware, but it’s great to see,” said Dale Vile of analyst Freeform Dynamics. “Someone has to start the ball rolling for issues such as enterprise software licensing to be addressed.”

Neil Ward-Dutton of analyst Macehiter Ward-Dutton said, “This is a bold move that hasn’t really been tried before, although IBM is using its HiPods [High-performance On-Demand Solutions] team as a pre-sales tool. The problem is that a lot of companies with grids have a lot of time invested in them and they are seen as real differentiators.”